Paper 2026/091

Round-Optimal Pairing-Free Blind Signatures

Julia Kastner, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
Stefano Tessaro, University of Washington
Greg Zaverucha, Microsoft (United States)
Abstract

We present the first practical, round-optimal blind signatures in pairing-free groups. We build on the Fischlin paradigm (EUROCRYPT 2007) where a first signature is computed on a commitment to the message and the final signature is a zero-knowledge proof of the first signature. We use the Nyberg-Rueppel signature scheme as the basis (CCS 1993), it is a well-studied scheme with a verification equation that is sufficiently algebraic to allow efficient proofs, that do not need to make non-black box use of a random oracle. Our construction offers flexibility for trade-offs between underlying assumptions and supports issuance of signatures on vectors of attributes making it suitable for use in anonymous credential systems. As a building block, we show how existing NIZKs can be modified to allow for straight-line extraction. We implement variants of our construction to demonstrate its practicality, varying the choice of elliptic curve and the proof system used to compute the NIZK. With conservative parameters (NIST-P256 and SHA-256) and targeting short proofs, signatures are 1349 bytes long, and on a typical laptop can be generated in under 500ms and verified in under 100ms.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Blind SignatureAnonymous CredentialsZero-Knowledge Proof
Contact author(s)
julia kastner @ cwi nl
tessaro @ cs washington edu
gregz @ microsoft com
History
2026-01-23: approved
2026-01-20: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2026/091
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/091,
      author = {Julia Kastner and Stefano Tessaro and Greg Zaverucha},
      title = {Round-Optimal Pairing-Free Blind Signatures},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/091},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/091}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.